Archive for the ‘Pronoun case’ Category

My most recent adventure in pronoun case — the posting “Usage note: NomPred”, about nominative predicative pronouns — ended with a screen capture with the bit of dialogue

No, that’s more you. That’s not me.

which I converted to a piss-elegant pronoun version with That’s not I.

I haven’t found recent examples of this pronoun usage, not That’s not I, That’s not she/he, That’s not they, or (worse) That’s not we — NomPred we is extraordinarily unnatural — but I did find an example from the late 19th century, in a bit of didactic verse for schoolchildren:

Some folks long to die
But that’s not I nor you.

(where it’s repeated as the fourth line of morally instructive quatrains; this is the end of the first verse) — here conveying ‘but that’s not the way you and I are, but you and I aren’t like that’, and so indirectly conveying both ‘but that’s not the way I am, but I’m not like that’ and also ‘nor should that be the way you are, nor should you be like that’.

Every so often, I’m brought up short by an example, in edited prose in a serious publication, of a nominative predicative pronoun that strikes me as deeply strange and unnatural. So it was yesterday as I read through the New York Times. In a piece by Alan Feuer (relevant sentence boldfaced):

[on-line 1/3] “One Brooklyn Man’s Lonely Journey to Jihad”, [in print 1/4] “Court Papers Detail a Drift Toward Jihad”
For years in Brooklyn, it was just he and mother, his alcoholic father having long ago abandoned them in Kazakhstan. She worked cleaning houses and was gone much of the day. He went to a large public high school, but spoke little English and had few, if any, friends.

Presumably, either Feuer or an editor was bewitched by the theory that predicative pronouns must necessarily be nominative (on the model of the hyperformal identifying formulas It is I and This is he), but in the specifying-it construction above, the pronoun case choice of native speakers would be accusative him, not nominative he.

Passed on to me by Ben Zimmer, a tweet, entitled “To Whom Is Responsible for This”, from author Colin Dickey (most recent book: Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places) with this photo of extraordinary whom on the hoof:

I see three contributing factors here: (A) a preference for fronting rather than stranding Ps in extraction constructions; (B) a mechanical application of a principle calling for (formal) parallelism in coordination; and (C) an irrational reverence for the case form whom (rather than who) of the (relative or interrogative) pronoun WHOM.

Yesterday from Ben Zimmer, e-mail saying that he’d recently seen a performance of the musical “Guys and Dolls” and thought I’d appreciate an exchange in the song “Marry the Man Today” (one of the songs that was cut for the movie adaptation), a duet for the characters Adelaide (Miss Adelaide of the Hot Box girls) and Sarah (Sister Sarah Brown in a Salvation Army band):

Adelaide: At Wanamaker’s and Saks and Klein’s
A lesson I’ve been taught
You can’t get alterations on a dress you haven’t bought.
Sarah: At any vegetable market from Borneo to Nome
You mustn’t squeeze a melon till you get the melon home.
Adelaide: You’ve simply got to gamble.
Sarah: You get no guarantee.
Adelaide: Now doesn’t that kind of apply to you and I?
Sarah: You and me.

(referring to Adelaide and Nathan Detroit, who runs a crap game; and Sarah and Sky Masterson, a high-rolling gambler)

A NomConjObj (nominative conjoined object) from Adelaide, corrected by Sarah. The first instance of NomConjObj in my life that I actually noticed — surely not the first that came past me, but the first I was conscious of, and tried to locate in its social world (working-class NYC low-lifes, in the show) — also part of my first experience of a live performance of a musical, in the original Broadway production, which opened in 1950. I was 10, and it was stunning.

Three recent xkcd cartoons: #1767 “US State Names” (goofy play on the names of the states), #1770 “UI Change” (on arbitrary and unannounced changes in user interfaces … and on aging), and #1771 “It Was I” (on pronoun case).

From the most recent NYT “Metropolitan Diary” (on-line on the 26th, in the national edition on the 28th), a contribution from Michael Joseloff that begins:

Two teenagers with clipboards were stopping passers-by on the Upper East Side. I was in a hurry to get to the bank, so I tried to maneuver past them and avoid their pitch. No luck.

“Me and my friend are trying to raise money to buy uniforms for our basketball team,” one of the boys began, before rattling on with the rest of his memorized speech. To paraphrase Renée Zellweger in “Jerry Maguire,” he had me at “me and my friend.” He seemed sincere. I decided to help.

I was desperately hoping that he was going to help the kid by making a contribution. But no: he proposed to help by correcting the kid’s grammar.

In today’s Stanford News, a report by Dayo Mitchell, “The projects conducted by the winners of the 2016 Firestone and Golden medals and the Kennedy Prize represent the breadth of the undergraduate experience at Stanford. They included research on germ cell, federal farm animal policy, the tailoring industry in Naples, ethics and autonomous vehicles, and the writings of author Zadie Smith.”

Thirty-five graduating seniors were recognized recently for their outstanding thesis projects. They are recipients of the 2016 Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, the Robert M. Golden Medal for Excellence in Humanities and Creative Arts; and the David M. Kennedy Honors Thesis Prize.

The prizewinners represent 24 academic departments and all three schools with undergraduate programs

This is a re-play (edited) of an exchange on ADS-L, back in 2005, about two subtopics in choosing case forms of pronouns in English. The thread was not posted about in Language Log at the time, but now some of these issues have arisen afresh on Facebook in recent days. I’m not sure if I can wrestle the current discussion into some sort of coherent shape, but I can at least revive a bit of the older conversation.

I started the thread on 8/11/05, under the heading “Case choice by rhyme”, and then on from there.

Created yesterday, a Page on this blog (under “Linguistics notes”) devoted to pronoun case in English, created originally for the use of Tyler Lemon, who’s working on a Stanford undergraduate honors thesis in linguistics on the topic, but now made availabe to everyone interested.

The page inventories postings (mostly on this blog, but some on Language Log, and a few elsewhere) on the choice between Nom and Acc in English, including who vs. whom, the case of conjoined objects, especially in the NomConjObj (Nom Conjoined Objects, like between you and I) construction, the case of subjects in embedded clauses (Acc case in ISOC — In-situ Subject of Clause — and ESOC — Extracted Subject of Clause), the case of pronouns in combination with preceding items like as, beside(s), but, including, like, than, case in inversion constructions (Along came me), case in predicatives (It is I/he/*they, It’s me/*I, That’s me/*Iin the photo), case in fragment constructions (for example, short answers to questions: Who’s there? Me/*I), case in formulas (Woe is me, Till death do us part), Nom he (He ‘God’, generic he) as object of preposition, case in appositives (we/us Americans), case choice and style/register, case choice influenced by the exigencies of rhyme (Oh where oh where has my little dog gone? / Oh where oh where can he be? / They make them [sausages] of dog they make them of horse, / I think they make them of he), case choice in nonstandard dialects, and more. Possessives (Poss my etc.) and reflexives (Refl myself etc.) are clearly related but this imventory touches on them only tangentially.